


Identity Crisis

by Madness_of_Xara



Series: Origin Stories [2]
Category: Saints Row
Genre: Alcohol, Deckers, Drugs, F/M, Gang Violence, Mentions of Underage Prostitution, Mugging, Recovery, Ronin - Freeform, Saints
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-27 03:56:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13872606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madness_of_Xara/pseuds/Madness_of_Xara
Summary: The origin story to my OC Mary Powell. It starts off kind of dark, so be warned!





	Identity Crisis

Akane Maki.

The first of three names.

The first of three separate identities.

She was the most distinct one, especially since she was the original.

Back when she was just a child, her parents had brought her from Japan to America, deciding to settle in the city of Stilwater. It wasn’t the best place, but her parents had a bright outlook in regards to it. A new place, a new life, they had instilled in their daughter. They would be happier in America, too, they claimed. Of course, the older Akane got, the more and more she could tell that, well… they weren’t happier there. They lived in a bad neighborhood, and both of her parents worked hard every single day just to make ends meet. Her parents started to argue more and more, seemingly never noticing their daughter whenever they started yelling. She would start to slip out of the house whenever they started to yell.

It wasn’t like they were going to notice that she was missing for a long while, anyways.

Akane had fallen in with the wrong crowd during those times. Whenever she had slipped away, she would go to a nearby park where this one group of teenagers would hang out every single day. They had bad home lives as well, so they had welcomed the girl with open arms. They would have cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs on them almost all the time. At first, she didn’t touch of that stuff, but eventually, she gave into temptation and tried each thing, one by one. She found that she hated smoking, but she loved the feeling that the alcohol and the drugs would give her. When she told the others what was happening at home, they looked to one another before offering her a deal that, at the time, she thought would be helpful to her parents.

She became a prostitute.

There were a lot of men in Stilwater that wanted a good fuck, and some of them seemed to really like them young. As long as Akane kept her mouth shut and took the money, they would keep coming to her. The first man who took her was so shocked to find out she was a virgin that he paid quite a bit more than anyone else. It had been his honor, he claimed as he had redressed himself, to have been her first. He would be sure to return to her if she were so inclined.

Akane played it smart when it came down to the money. She would give her new friends a good chunk each before hiding the rest in jars, hiding them under a creaky floorboard in her home until she had made more than enough to help her parents significantly. She had been elaborate, telling her father that she almost tripped over the floorboard numerous times before he finally got around to taking a look at it. He was so shocked to see the money that he started crying.

“A gift from the gods!” he had exclaimed. Her parents slowly stopped arguing, and it was only then that they realized the downward spiral Akane had fallen into. It was subtle at first. But when they noticed her wearing long sleeves, even in the dead heat of the summer, they took action. They investigated and were shocked to find dark bruises around numerous puncture wounds in both arms. Before they could confront her properly about it, the girl had panicked and ran away.

She had started to live in the park with her friends.

Some of them had vanished throughout the next few years. Gang wars had taken them, or their parents had. It was all a matter of circumstance.

When it slowly became just Akane and three boys, she asked them if they ever thought about selling the drugs they used. They had looked at her like that had been what they had been doing all along. It wasn’t long after that they gave her some supplies to start up her own business. As long as they got a cut, they didn’t care. She sold quite a bit more than them, to their shock, and when they asked how, she shrugged.

“A product of timing and having clients at the ready from my other job,” she had explained simply. They nodded solemnly at that.

By the time she was sixteen years old, she was an alcoholic, a drug addict, and the biggest drug dealer in all of Stilwater. With that title came consequences, though. It had brought on the unwanted attention of the Ronin, a gang in the city that had recently come to power. She was doing her deals as usual in an alley way, a bag of alcohol in one hand as she waited on her next customer. When he came, it started off as a normal transaction…

Until he refused to hand over the money, instead stabbing her through her middle. A couple of inches either way and she would have been royally fucked.

While she had been downed by the stab, she was beaten and mugged, her supplies and money gone. As she laid there, bleeding and freaking out, she swore that her life had flashed before her eyes. When one of her clients found her, she could only count herself lucky. When she woke up in the hospital later on, she found it had been one of her old friends, one of the boys from the park that had moved to another part of the city. He looked at her with pure worry, though he also appeared relieved that she was alright. He told her that she needed to lay low, maybe just get out of the game altogether. When she told him that would be hard to explain to the others, he smiled shakily and promised to talk to them for her. He had kissed her before leaving.

He died a month later from overdosing.

When Akane was allowed out of the hospital, she had made a decision to change. She started going to rehabilitation and AA meetings. It took a year or so before she was able to kick her addictions and turn her life around. To help herself stay low, as her friend had suggested, she had changed her name to Kasumi Kato and she had gotten just a touch of plastic surgery. It was just enough to keep her from being immediately recognizable. She had started a personal blog online to record her trials as a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. She had a decent fan base, most everyone there praising her for getting through those struggles by herself. She was even really good friends with one British user that had been by her side since the start of her blog.

Over the course of that year, she had gotten a new profession as a waitress at a local diner, having given up prostitution and drug dealing altogether. She would crack bad jokes and she took up coding as a hobby whenever she was at home in her apartment, which she had thoroughly cleaned, desperate to keep herself from falling back into that horrible pit she had been trapped in. She would host small parties for her neighbors and volunteered at the soup kitchens whenever she could. When she found that some of the homeless had troubles with drugs and alcohol, she would ask if they wanted to stop. If they did, she tried her best to help them keep from their vices, and if they didn't, well… She wished them luck. By the time Christmas rolled around, everyone knew her as Kasumi Kato, a generous young soul who could do nothing wrong.

Life was… well, it was finally normal.

She even sent letters to her parents to let them know that she was alright. She was doing better, bit by bit, she had wrote them. She promised, whenever she was settled into this new life of hers, she would come back to them. But for now… She had a lot to deal with.

Then it all changed when Shogo, the head of the Ronin, had approached her at the diner she worked at and offered her a job as his right hand woman. She was angry at first, then confused. Why would he want _her_? She was a normal woman now, not… not who she used to be. When she asked, he shrugged and said simply, "You're a pretty face, and honestly, I think it'll keep the men in line." When she had expressed her annoyance at just being called a pretty face, he offered her a lot of money. Enough money that she could live much more comfortably, and maybe even get those homeless people that wanted help the help they NEEDED. She hesitated, then took the job.

At first, Kasumi was scared of Shogo. Terrified even! He was a controlling asshole with a lot of ego problems. But after a couple of months, she had learned to ignore her fears of him, along with all of his faults, turning a blind eye to them for the most part. She handled the gang efficiently, and she even was able to handle Shogo's temper tantrums whenever he had them, which was, unfortunately, a lot of the time. She started to grow a cold side because of Shogo and the Ronin. She would never allow herself to get hurt by them again, no matter what the cost. Of that, she promised herself. And during the course of her time with the gang, she had proved herself to be increasingly observant, and she seemed to have grown to be calculating and rather strategical. She even hid weaponry on her body just in case something ever happened in which she would need to defend herself.

Of course, when the Saints came back to Stilwater, Kasumi expressed her worries, only to be ignored. She took the initiative and contacted her friend, Viola, in Steelport, asking if she could set her up over there and get her out of Stilwater. As a favor to her, Viola had set up an interview between her and Matt Miller, a young Brit that she would grow to fall in love with, even if at first she never realized that she was falling for him. When he interviewed her, she had told him that her name was Mary, not wanting him to find out her name at the time. After all, Mary was a common enough name, she felt, so it was a safe name to use. She didn't want him to know that she was currently in another gang, desperate to leave it out of fear of dying because her boss refused to listen to her. She proved her worth to Matt by draining the Ronin's accounts and then fixing them when Shogo called her and freaked out about it, demanding that she did something about it.

When she returned to Stilwater that night after the interview over in Steelport, she came back to the plan of an ambush on the Saints. She had _warned_ them that it was not a good idea, that they would get murdered. Once again, she was ignored.

Funny how she was right, huh?

Kasumi had been the only survivor of that massacre.

She had been spared by Johnny Gat and the Boss of the Third Street Saints. She ran to Steelport, promising that she would remember how they spared her. Because she ran, however, she believed herself to be a coward of the highest caliber. And some would agree. But most? They would have seen it as self preservation. When she ran to Steelport, she had officially changed her name once again, changing it to Mary Powell, along with once more getting some plastic surgery. She had joined Matt as his second hand, and it was because of her that his gang grew. She helped come up with the name and their style and colors. She was happy this time around, and she learned how to better code and hack. Matt was vastly different from Shogo and she wasn’t in the slightest bit afraid of him. She still stayed in touch with her parents, explaining that some things came up and she had to move to Steelport. She gave them her new address, telling them that they could come visit anytime they would have liked.

And now?

She was curled in the corner of her bed, staring at the black sheets blankly for the longest time. She had just gotten a letter from her parents saying that they were coming to visit. She had to brace herself, especially since it had been so long since she had seen them. Matt was in the room with her, pacing nervously. She had asked him to be with her when she saw them again, and oddly enough, he seemed even more nervous than she did about the whole thing. Then again, ever since they started dating, she could imagine why. It was that classic, ‘What if they don’t like me?’ kind of situation.

“A-are you sure? That they’ll like me, I mean,” Matt asked her for what was probably the sixth time. Mary smiled nervously, looking up at him.

“I’m sure,” she nodded. When she heard the doorbell, she tensed. Slowly, she got up off the bed, looking to Matt. They took another by the hand before nodding to one another. Together… They were doing something that was terrifying to the both of them together.

Step by step, they went to the front door.


End file.
